Abstract
New Mexico has long promoted itself as a rich compound of Indigenous, Spanish and Anglo-American cultures and histories. Those peddling everything from tourist packages to vacation homes have often cited this ‘enchanting blend’ as one of the state’s most attractive amenities. Perhaps not surprisingly, though, this ‘tri-cultural’ designation has been challenged both on its own terms and for what it excludes. Myla Vicenti Carpio’s Indigenous Albuquerque is a compelling example of the latter. With considerable acuity, it assails the official dogma that three ‘founding’ cultures have been equal partners in the social, political and economic life of the state. Each of its five chapters demonstrates how Indigenous peoples have been consistently excluded from the fruits of the state’s prosperity since the first European settlers arrived more than four centuries ago. Yet Carpio’s account is not merely a story of victimisation. It sets out to interrupt the view that Indigenous people were ‘passive onlookers’ to the region’s development by revealing how those that live in its largest city, Albuquerque, have ‘sought actively to shape and negotiate changes throughout the course of their colonization’ (p. 26).
Indigenous Albuquerque is a welcome addition to the range of book-length studies that have focused on particular Indigenous communities in North American urban environments. It is distinguished among the best of its counterparts in that it breaks decisively with a tradition of scholarship that has imagined ‘urban’ and ‘Indigenous’ as radically incompatible terms. Some studies in this vein have worked to reify problematic assumptions about a static Indigenous authenticity that is fundamentally at odds with the apparent fluidity and dynamism of urban life. Others have pathologised urban Indigenous experience by equating it with cultural loss and alienation. Both assertions have left little room for Indigenous agency, imagining Indigenous migrants to the city as hapless, vulnerable and prone to be corrupted by their encounter with the dominant society. Carpio’s contribution pushes back against this paternalistic tradition by stressing resilience, adaptation and survival.
Importantly, then, her study also goes a long way in breaking down the problematic dichotomisation of reservation and city, rendering both as relational geographies. It shows that many Indigenous people in Albuquerque are not alienated from the culture of reservation communities but move in ‘constant flux’ between more remote Indigenous geographies and their urban homes. Carpio’s contribution challenges the fraught view that reservation life is the lone container of Indigenous authenticity by revealing how urban Indigenous people are constantly engaged in the production of new Native subjectivities, political potentialities and forms of life.
Indigenous Albuquerque is also distinguished by its decidedly contemporary relevance. While most scholarship on North American Indigenous urbanisation has focused on the aftermath of the Second World War, and particularly the era of Termination and Relocation, Indigenous Albuquerque extends its analysis into the present. One of the more interesting parts of the book, for example, considers Clinton-era welfare reforms and surveys their deleterious effects on urban Indian Country. Yet readers also benefit from Carpio’s longue durée approach. Her narrative starts with the first European migrations to contemporary New Mexico but she does not get mired in exhaustive historical detail. Rather, Carpio uses this extended historical approach to make the case that in order to understand some of the complexities of Indigenous experience in contemporary Albuquerque, we must understand the city itself as the product of a colonial political economy with enduring effects. Critically, then, she demonstrates that processes of colonisation were not external to the founding of Albuquerque but intimately connected to it.
For these and other reasons, Indigenous Albuquerque is a timely intervention and a valuable addition to the rather small group of monographs that provide in-depth analyses of specific urban Indigenous communities in North America. While Carpio’s focus on Albuquerque does make her observations rather place-specific, there is much in this volume for those with an interest in comparative urban indigeneities.